On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 17:26, Ahmed Isah wrote: > In my opinion, Cornelio Hopmann got it all wrong. The issue is not to do > with selling a useless product that has no demand. Rather, it has to do > with whether the target market is really aware of the benefits of the > product to them. This then boils down to illiteracy of the benefits of > the Internet to the user. Take my case as an example. We provide a 24 PC > Internet connectivity in an academic environment in Nigeria with about > 10,000 students and 400 academic staff. Yet, the connectivity was not > maximally utilised. However, when we embarked on Internet awareness > training to the students, we now have to plan for more PCs as the > students continue to troop in.
On the contrary. He is making some points that people tend to miss a lot of the time. Internet as Magic Solution to the World's Problems tends to cloud otherwise good vision. You essentially describe a case where you are generating demand which ties in with his point that there is little demand to start with. He is in effect saying the the real demand is at a more basic level (pumping more mundane knowledge into people's brains) to which I might venture to add the possibility that this is what will drive up demand to make the impact of increased connectivity worth the direct cost (and indirect cost from non-executed alternatives given a fixed potential amount of funds). It's sort of the same as the local content issue. No one seems to know what to do with technology in certain areas such as so-called 'sub' Saharan Africa and this results in incomplete ideas, such as just supply bandwidth and some fuzzy benefit and it will all work out fine. I guess people are trying to understand how the action will connect to real benefits especially after having seen decades of failure for development in general. ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org